Friday, October 23, 2009

How about in the 4.0 Patch, where gear is fairly irrelevant and a lot of the raiding content has been cleared leading to piles and piles of Emblems being stocked up with nothing to spend them on, the Emblems themselves become Bind to Account? By the end of 3.3 many mains are going to have 100's of EoT's stockpiled from running heroics and raids in 3.3, but unfortunately will have nothing to invest in those EoT's in. Transferring them to be spent on an alt, either for raiding or gaining DPS items to level with, renders these items useful beyond their usual expiration date and has the potential to bridge the gap between lvl80 hierlooms and 81-85 levelling content.

1 comments:

EQ2 actually takes things one step further, as they recently went through and changed large amounts of dungeon loot from BOP to heirloom. The rationale was roughly A) EQ2 does not have dual spec, and this change facilitates people running raids on their healer and funneling the loot to their DPS alts and B) most of the loot in question is dropped in chests, and players were switching in alts after the boss fight anyway.

Blizzard would prefer NOT to go that route, and are hoping that massive gear inflation plus random cross-server LFG is enough to fix the problem. Time will tell. Personally, gear is ALREADY basically irrelevant to my non-raiding main (i.e. I outgear all the content that I actually do), so I'm basically assuming that all my emblems will be spent on heirlooms for alts anyway.

The bigger question is whether Blizzard breaks with tradition and tunes the level 81+ Cataclysm content assuming that players have group gear. Triumph epics, at ilvl 245 epic, are effectively ilvl 271 greens, and the top Icecrown gear stops a whopping 100 ilvls below that. The transition will be absolutely brutal for new alts who didn't spend time gearing at level 80 if Blizzard goes that route. On the other hand, if they tune around Icecrown quests, the existing heirlooms (approximately ilvl 200 rares) are already ahead of the curve for Cataclysm.